


wide as the salts, deep as the sky

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what you wish in the wasteland: that your children will be scarier than those that might devour them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wide as the salts, deep as the sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fells](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fells/gifts).



Miss Giddy tells a story, and sometimes she falls asleep before the end.

In the vault, when that happened, the Dag was always the first to suggest her own endings. Capable was never amused. 

“What do you mean, the man grew fangs and hair like a beast? They were _in love_ ,” she insisted.

“They’re still in love,” The Dag said, “only now he has teeth and hair like a beast. Hush. I’m telling this story.”

Another time Toast said, nose wrinkling, “The ground can’t _swallow_ people, Daggy, that’s not how it _works_ ,” and the Dag had promptly lost interest in sitting with them. That’s the point of stories. In stories, it doesn’t _matter_ how anything works, so long as the ending means something.

*

Furiosa is much, much more interesting than anyone else Joe has ever put at their door, after Rictus, who was simple, and Scrotus, who was cruel, but relentlessly, tediously so.

The Dag is especially interested in how close she keeps her hair. For a few weeks, the Dag asks questions that get no answers, but it feels good to ask all the same. She wants to know where she came from and why she dresses like half war boy and half desert warrior, she wants to know what happened to her arm, and she especially wants to know how Furiosa became the deadliest of Joe’s Imperators with only one three flesh limbs and one machine.

The last question makes her face do something, not quite a smile, but at least acknowledgement. “Not the deadliest,” she says.

Angharad is always shushing her. With Joe, with Cheedo, a brand-new wife, not yet menstruating even though she looks old enough, like she’s a drought instead of a girl, now with Furiosa. Angharad thinks that if they can all be silent enough, there will be a day after Joe. “ _After_ ,” she whispers fervently, when she wants the Dag to behave.

The Dag does not think there will be an _after_ , so she would like some answers _now_.  

“Were you ugly when your hair was long,” the Dag wants to know. “Only, I found out when my hair was short that I am much uglier with no hair, and since you’re very pretty with no hair I wondered if it might be the same.”

Furiosa laughs with her mouth open, and the inside of her cheeks are so bright she feels warm inside. Angharad has moved past shushing her and actually moves to put her hand over the Dag’s mouth, as if she can undo time and push the unsightly words back into the Dag’s mouth.

“Oh, stop,” Furiosa says to Angharad. “It’s fine.”

Dag gets to the first of her answers: “I wore my hair long as a girl. I do not know if I was particularly ugly. The mothers wouldn’t have mentioned it if I were.”

Angharad stops shushing the Dag. The Dag needs to know who the mothers are, where Furiosa came from, how she rose to the top of Joe’s mass of followers. Furiosa is a coil of addictive secrets — every time she unwinds a careful loop after that, the Dag wants to tug free much, much more.

*

Toast came from the bullet farm, and the Dag loves her the way that she loves Miss Giddy. The Dag does not believe in a real _after_ for herself, but Toast, sure as the sun in the morning, will have an after if she has to put a bullet in a hundred _todays_.

There is a story in one of the books about a man who could put anything he wanted into his quiver and it became an arrow. The Dag thinks Toast is like that: one day her chance will come and something will turn into a weapon in her hands. The Dag has been imprisoned long enough that she would like to see the moment come to pass.

Sometimes, looking at Cheedo, the Dag wonders if she might have grown up kind under a different sun.

*

Furiosa tells them that there will never be a chance to leave as perfect as today.

Miss Giddy will not come, and the Dag vows to stay with her, and then, when Miss Giddy will not budge, she vows to throw herself from the citadel.

“No, love,” Miss Giddy says. The Dag touches the mirror-slanted script at her wrist and cries. She realizes then that she had lied to herself; she had, in her own secret vaults, pictured that there might be an after, and in that after she’d collected the history that Miss Giddy had, carved it into her own skin, just the same — added in their own story and maybe an ending. She’d wanted to choose an ending.

“You will,” Miss Giddy insists, and the Dag realizes that she’s been blubbering. “Now be brave, dear.”

*

There is a long drive, and a mess, and she meets and loses the keeper of the seeds. She cannot possibly bear to think about it if she wants to keep all of the gears inside of her moving forward. She doesn’t know everything about mechanics, but she knows that there are parts of a car that can rust and fall off but the car keeps running, and some that are more essential.

She feels like parts of her are rusting and falling off, but they must not be essential, because she hasn’t stopped running yet.

*

After, the sea monster inside the Dag’s stomach is restless. It’s been circling for days, warding off hunger but somehow also sleep. Back at the citadel, the night never sprawls as well as it did when they were out on the edges of the salts, and she keeps her eyes pointed upwards with suspicion.

She was never supposed to deal with this alone. Angharad was supposed to go first, show her how, and now she isn’t here to do any of that. She isn’t here for the Dag to scold, either, which might make her the most angry.

It was safe to assume it would be hideous — any spawn of Joe’s was half-doomed from the start, and of course, she was no beauty herself. Angharad’s child would have been fine, tempered by Angharad’s beauty or at the very least softened by her gentleness.

The Dag though, pointy of face and with a heart full of thorns, had nothing inside of her to tip the balance. When she pictured him, he was a slithering thing, deep inside of her, thrashing, stirring up murky waters below the skin.

It was the main reason she pictured that the sea monster was male: he listened to no one, spun when she most wanted him still. “Be still now,” she demanded. It was dark and she hoped to sit by herself.

*

There is a place past the Bullet Farm by three day’s run. Or, there was, once. The Dag no longer knows, and she’s at peace enough with the uncertainty that she’d rather not know for sure. This way, the people there can exist and not exist at once.

The children sleep underground there, where it is cooler at night.

On the shortest day of the year, when dark falls early, they paint the strongest and meanest looking and they sit outside all night, hissing and spitting and pounding their drums, to keep monsters at bay, and remind evil that even their little underground communities fight back.

No one ever let the Dag be a part of spirits night. Maybe if they had, she’d have known how to look the part when the war boys had come through, taking what they wanted with no regard — mostly things, but her as well.

If she’d bared her teeth, or if someone had trained her to claw and slash, might she have known how to pounce sharps-first?

Her son will know spirits night. She will teach him.

Of course, the keeper of the seeds could be right: it could be a girl. The Dag took a smoky pleasure in imagining her with fangs and scaled wings, terrifying and loud. No one had taught her how to use her teeth, but she would teach a girl, file her claws so that no one would ever get the best of her and walk away.

This is what you wish in the wasteland: that your children will be scarier than those that might devour them.

*

The top of the Citadel is lush and green. It hurts to look at. Miss Giddy helps her up the steps when she is too round to trust her own center of gravity, and she feels ridiculous that she needs her help.

Miss Giddy can never resist a lesson. “Past there,” she points at the waste, “past where the eye can see, the salts.”

“I’ve been to the salts,” the Dag reminds her.

“Yes,” Miss Giddy says, closing her eyes. “When I was a girl, they weren’t salts.”

The Dag squints. The sun glinting off the sand makes her eyes tired, and she shades them with her hand. “Who … what were they?”

The Dag stares at Miss Giddy’s arms while she talks, as always finding new words etched into Miss Giddy’s skin. Reading is slow work for her when the book is in the order she’s used to, and twice as bad when created for mirror image reading. There are numbers, a lot of them; Dag’s noticed them before, only because she they look so distinctive, and always four in a row.

“When I was a girl,” Miss Giddy says, “They were filled with water.”

The Dag digests this, touching a ticklish bit of greenery sprouting near enough to stroke. “But they’re flat,” she points out dubiously.

“They are now,” Miss Giddy says. “The wind has pushed around the sand.”

“And water goes into the sand,” the Dag says, still poking at Miss Giddy’s logic like a loose tooth, compulsive. Miss Giddy doesn’t mind — she half raised the Dag, gave her that name when her first became an unwanted painful relic of her childhood, or at least she'd led her to it when she asked her what she’s like to be and the Dag thought, _left alone._ “I’ve seen it when the Immortan used to let the aqua cola down for the wretched.”

“It is very difficult to describe to you a whole world, when the world has done such a bastard change,” Miss Giddy says, pausing every few words. She is tired, and the Dag loves her ceaselessly. Angharad was so in awe of Furiosa from the moment she’d realized that one of Immortan Joe’s imperators was a woman, that the Dag felt like she’d forgotten who had taken care of them, taught every one of them but Toast to read.

The Dag leaned against her, just a bit, enough that she would know she was there. “Take your time,” she says, leaning back and supporting herself on her palms, cooling dirt beneath them.

When she was younger, the newest wife in Joe’s vault, Miss Giddy had known everything and the Dag had wanted to belong to her instead, if she had to belong.

*

Her sisters all find a place for themselves. Toast is practically the captain of the war boys. Cheedo the Fragile, with her light touch is learning to draw beneath the skin with ink. Miss Giddy is teaching her. Capable rides with Furiosa.

The Dag is adrift. Cheedo comes to her side, timing unpredictable except to the Dag who sometimes knows she is coming by the breeze that greets her in the morning. “Hello little,” the Dag tells her, in the morning when Cheedo arrives with some leaves she demands the Dag chew one.

The Dag’s sea monster is thrashing because he doesn’t want her to chew on anything, so she says _no, thanks_. (Early, she might have thought it was because of he is a small man, that he is angry and controlling her from the inside, already, but now she feels more charitable toward him. She thinks maybe he is frightened, so she makes a point to tell him now, that he will be scarier than anything that he will meet. She will teach him herself.)

“You’re not doing well, and Alba says it will help. With the sick.”

The Dag does not say _yes_ , so Cheedo keeps going. Cheedo is brave now that no one owns her. “I will kiss you if you’ll try to chew on these.”

Well. The Dag blinks at her, studying her small beautiful face for a little while before letting out a long sigh and reaching for the plant in her hand.

She puts one in her mouth at a time, moving her jaw mechanically, trying not to wince. When Cheedo is satisfied, she lets the Dag spit out the green pulp, and leans towards her. Their mouths meet, tentative.

“Yuck,” Cheedo says, swiping at her mouth. “Sorry I made you chew on that.”

The Dag flushes, embarrassed, but Cheedo crowds in close to her, visibly excited. “Next time no leaves, okay?”

*

Max comes back to the Citadel after Dag gets too big to climb to the top of the Citadel, but before the baby comes.

Furiosa is not at the Citadel when he gets there, because eighty days after they came back, Furiosa had already abdicated to the last remaining of the many mothers, and Alba, one of the milking mothers, who has a knack for knowing the needs of the people, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Corpus Callosus.

“Furiosa is back on the rig,” the Dag tells him. He looks fleetingly out towards the dust, as if he’s looking for her, like she’d be visible to him in the long stretch of nothing before he looks back at her, nodding.

“You know she’d want you to stay until she gets back,” she tells him, and he makes an equivocating grunt. “You’ll stay,” she tells him, more firmly.

He spends some time tinkering with his bike, and a little more time pacing the halls of the citadel. Toast is ecstatic. The Dag almost goes out of her way to tell him so, because if you haven’t lived with her it can be hard to tell, but decides he’s best left on his own, the two of them making silent circles together.

*

Eventually the sea monster wants to get out. The Dag’s found herself back in the vault where she used to sleep much more frequently the weeks before, tidying and remembering and generally enjoying the peace and quiet of their abandoned home.

When the pain radiates from inside of her, sharp and tearing, and there’s no one with her. She’s too much pride to call out like a child, but wishes for someone, anyone, Miss Giddy or Alba or one of her sisters. She lowers herself down and presses the heel of her hand against her stomach, tearing her own lip to ribbons with her teeth to keep from sobbing.

Angharad’s words are still painted on the far wall, and the Dag repeats them, over and over in her head, _our sons will not be warlords_.

Miss Giddy finds her, because she knows everything, and sends a scrappy war pup off to find the other women, and the Dag cries into her skirts.

*

“Willful and fierce,” Cheedo said, brushing the hair from her face and bestowing kisses on her, temple to chin. “Like her mother.”

The Dag feels like neither of those things now. There is blood between her legs and the child, she looks fresh from battle, like she’s ripped someone’s throat out with her teeth and is headed to Valhalla.

Dag rapidly spirals through her repulsion to find some kind of joy behind that. Toast is handling her deftly, wiping the blood from her with a towel with steady hands.

“A child,” the Dag says, thinking of the rusted parts that have fallen away from her, how she doesn't know which of them were important to the base machine of her, “may need many mothers.”

She means all of them, but her eyes find Cheedo, hopeful.

Cheedo braids the hair behind the Dag’s ears, like she always has. The Dag’s eyes keep filling, wet, and Cheedo swipes at them before the Dag goes to, like some kind of extension of herself. The baby cries, and Cheedo brings her to her.

“Stay,” the Dag pleads.

She does. 


End file.
